DIRECTOR'S BLOG

So much of life in the global highrise is hidden from public view, behind concrete walls. Even more invisible are the virtual/internet lives of highrise residents. So what is digital connectivity like in the global highrise?

Only a few days earlier, Statistics Canada revealed that “Overall, about 80 per cent of all Canadian households had Internet access in 2010… Almost all the homes with total incomes above $87,000 were connected, while just 54 per cent of households with incomes under $30,000 had access,” according to The Canadian Press (good coverage at cbc.ca too).

That’s quite the Digital Divide. The stats also reveal a discrepancy between urban and rural. But our question is: how does this play out in the suburb highrise? What is the relationship between virtual social networks and the geography of suburbs? What does this mean for the future of a (sub)urban planet? These are questions I have been fascinated with since beginning HIGHRISE, and we are starting to get some early answers this week, as we begin production on our HIGHRISE Digital Citizenship Project. It’s a unique collaboration between our HIGHRISE team, residents in a Toronto Highrise, and a team of academic researchers, led by Prof. Deborah Cowen and Emily Paradis PhD, and connected to the Global Suburbanism MCRI project at York University.

This week, we are working with 14 highrise residents as Peer Researchers, who are going door-to-door with our survey in their highrise building, interviewing their neighbours about digital technologies, their use, access and effects. From the results and discussions that arise with the residents, we hope to gain some baseline knowledge about the state of “digital citizenship” in one building. We hope to build on this data, possibly by doing comparative studies elsewhere in the world, and by going deeper with interviews, focus groups and documentary methods within the building itself. After the first survey session earlier this week, one peer researcher told me she’s been working as a community engagement officer in this building (that she live in) for a while now, but the survey was the first time she got to go into people’s homes to really see residents in their own space.

She said, “We sat down and talked with this lady in her kitchen as she chopped potatoes with a huge knife, the knife was really flying around! And we learned about how she accesses *that other world* – the one on the internet. It’s a huge learning experience for me, and its going to connect residents in this building.”

What’s most cool about the project is the energy that’s bubbling up both on the ground with the peer researchers and residents, and at the high-level academic conceptual level ,with what Deb as Principal Investigator is doing, and how the two are informing each other as we go along.

As Deb says in her early writings about the project: “It is now well established that digital technologies are deeply engrained at a global scale, and furthermore, that these technologies are a crucial part of the logistics of globalization. By reshaping economic, social and cultural forms and flows, digital technologies implicate even those who do not have access to the tools or infrastructure for direct connection. Digital technologies have reshaped collective life, transforming how, where, and when we produce, communicate, learn, re/create, and consume. Digital technologies create virtual and actual communities, they keep people connected across vast distances, they make ideas and information flow far and wide. Yet, they also ‘flexibilize’ working conditions, for instance, extending the working day well into personal time and space, they centralize the dissemination of information, enhance state and corporate surveillance capacities, privatize infrastructure and even citizenship. These technologies can speed things up and open new worlds, and they can cut people off and keep people out. In other words, the impacts of digital technologies are profound and they reshape everyday life in complex, ambiguous, and sometimes, contradictory ways.

This project posits that everyday life in suburban tower communities is shaped by digital technologies in distinct ways that warrant attention. The ‘global suburb’ is an underexplored urban condition in academic research, yet as the Global Suburbanism Major Collaborative Research Initiative[1] might suggest, it may well be the dominant experience and condition of the ‘global city’. An emphasis on what we term the ‘global suburb’ highlights not simply a particular space within the global city, but as we explore in more detail through this research, a set of processes and experiences of social polarization and segregation on the one hand, and on the other hand, particular forms of physical and virtual connection and circulation. Drawing on recent work on the ‘in-between city’ (Keil et al 2011), we suggest that the social geographies and spatial forms particular to these ‘global suburbs’ are paradigmatic in an era of global mobility and precarity. The complex dynamics of fixity and flow that characterize these spaces furthermore trouble any simple notion of citizenship and add nuance to the study of digital citizenship.”

[1] A 7-year international research project funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and led by principal investigator Roger Keil at York University.

Kristyna (L) Research Field Coordinator, gets data from Nasra and Rita, Peer Researchers.

Jordana, Research Coordinator, shows off our 15 languages sheet – represent the plethora of languages that our team members speak. We show this sheet to residents, (it includes the name in english and in the language itself) so people can identify the language of their choice.

FLAHIVE and CIZEK at MIT, HIGHRISE Senior Producer Gerry Flahive and Director Katerina Cizek visit Open Doc Lab at MIT, with workshops and exchanges across multiple disciplines and laboratories. on October 22 2012

LIVE RADIO BROADCAST from "HIGHRISE", Canad's most listened-to radio program, CBC: Metro Morning, broadcasts live from the site of the NFB HIGHRISE project. 5:30 - 8:30 am on February 15 2012

HIGHRISE at INT'L CONFERENCE ON CITZENSHIP, U of T Prof. Deb Cowen, Research Consultant Emily Paradis, PhD, present early findings from our Digital Citizenship in the Global Suburbs at prestigious academic conference, "Opening the Boundaries of Citizenship" at Open University in the UK. on February 06 2012

HIGHRISE IN THE TORONTO SUBWAY!, HIGHRISE/ONE MILLIONTH TOWER is adapted to a public art installation on the screens and poster space of the TTC! Presented by TTC Pattison One Stop, curated by Sharon Switzer. 6 silent films, 4 posters. on January 01 2012

Re-Imagining Our City, screening of One Millionth Tower, and panel discussion with the people who made this documentary happen.
Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen St west, Toronto, ON on December 06 2011 18:00

ONE MILLIONth TOWER at IDFA, Last year's winners of the IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling (that would be HIGHRISE) are back in competition for the this year's prize at IDFA, with a new production, One Millionth Tower. 15 entries, 4 of which are NFB. on November 16 2011

SPECIAL FRONTLINE CLUB SCREENING of 1MT, Mozilla and Power to the Pixel present "The Evolution of Cinema, Documentary and the Web," introducing One Millionth Tower. Kat Cizek with open-source cinema guru Brett Gaylor, of Mozilla, moderated by Liz Rosenthal, of Power to the Pixel. Very Limited Seating. on November 07 2011

LAUNCH of 1MT, Noew HIGHRISE documentary, One Millionth Tower, launches at Mozilla Festival, in London U.K. (and on-line too!) on November 05 2011

FLAHIVE at PLANET in FOCUS FESTIVAL, Flahive represents HIGHRISE at
DIGITAL DO-GOODERS PANEL
@ The Al Green Theatre, Miles Nadel Jewish Community Centre
Visual storytellers are creating content that motivates activism as well as entertain. on October 14 2011 11:15

CIZEK at the BRITISH LIBRARY, Kat Cizek gives a summer scholar talk at the British Library, with a tour of Out My Window, and a discussion about the digital documentary. on September 16 2011 12:00

CIZEK keynote @ Open University, UK, Keynote lecture at the International Visual Methods Conference at Open University in Milton Keynes, U.K. on September 13 2011

HIGHRISE at OPEN VIDEO CONFERENCE, NYC, One Millionth Tower, our latest HIGHRISE production, to be discussed at a multi-day summit of thought leaders in business, academia, art, and activism to shape the future of online video. on September 10 2011

HIGHRISE in MEXICO, Michelle Van Beusekom (Assistant Director General of English Program, NFB) represents HIGHRISE at the World Forum of Public Broadcasting in Mexico. on June 09 2011

OUT MY WINDOW live cinema screening, in Montreal, as part of the DNA Symposium. Live music score improvised by Sam Shalabi, Michel F Coté, and Alexandre St-Onge. on May 14 2011 19:30

CIZEK at DNA conference, Keynote at international symposium on database narrative.
Concordia University on May 12 2011

HIGHRISE at Toronto the Good Party, This party brings together a broad cross-section of Torontonians who are interested in the City and in city building. Follows the Toronto Tower Renewal Symposium, at Hart House. on May 12 2011

HIGHRISE UP FOR A ONE WORLD MEDIA AWARD, U.K.-based One World Media Awards recognize the unique role journalists and filmmakers in bridging the divide between different societies and raising awareness of vital development issues. on May 10 2011